Big Men

“This Means War” and “Bullhead.”

Chris Pine, Reese Witherspoon, and Tom Hardy in a new movie directed by McG.Credit Illustration by Edwin Fotheringham

If you already know François Truffaut’s “Jules et Jim,” then you should be able, with minor adjustments, to make sense of “This Means War.” All you need to do is reconfigure Jules and Jim as hip young gunslingers in the C.I.A., who, though resident in Los Angeles, spend the first scene shooting a bunch of hoods on the roof of a Hong Kong high-rise. You must also imagine that Jim has tattoos and a Cockney accent, whereas Jules has a glass-bottomed pool in the ceiling of his apartment, so that he can watch women do the breaststroke from below. (Unusual, on a government salary.) Oh, and our heroes’ final feat is to wrestle each other while falling out of the back of an airplane, into the howling night. Apart from that, as I say, it’s just like Truffaut.

The Jules character is known as F.D.R. (Chris Pine), and the new-look Jim is Tuck (Tom Hardy). Trapped between them, in place of Jeanne Moreau, is Reese Witherspoon. She plays Lauren, for whose heart the two guys aggressively compete, using the skills acquired in counter-terrorism; both of them, for instance, break into her house and plant listening devices while she’s making popcorn. Lauren is employed by a product-testing company called Smart Consumer. Something about the wanton lack of imaginative effort behind that name tells you a lot about “This Means War,” which is less of a motion picture and more of a product that has itself been tested, to the point of exhaustion, for its loyalty to the tropes of two genres: the romantic comedy and the blustering thriller. No film whose first conversation includes the words “Mission is a go. Repeat: you are green to go” can be expected to break fresh ground, and this work, unstinting in its duties toward the frighteningly obvious, provides a granite-faced European villain, a Russian henchman who is tracked down to a strip joint and strapped to a dancer’s pole, and, for Lauren, a best friend with a fat husband and a filthy mouth.

The director is McG, who really should come out of the Witness Protection Program and get himself a proper name. Another possibility, which I find ever more credible, is that he is not a person but a committee of A.D.H.D. sufferers, all of whom have been issued with extra caffeine and a Spotify account. No motion, however slight, is allowed to pass without a musical energy boost; when Lauren and F.D.R. make out, back at her place, they do so not in privacy but with a noisy thrashing of rock to goad them on, as if a guitarist and a drummer were crouching in the bathroom. The same thing happens, unbelievably, when F.D.R. is hit in the neck with a tranquillizer dart—one event that even McG might have associated with mental calm. What fuels these incidents, I think, and what governs the movie’s fistfights, which come across as a blizzard of random punches, is not eagerness but fear. When William Wellman and his crew filmed aerial combat for “Wings” (1927), the first movie to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards—and, by coincidence, another tale of two pals who adore the same dame—the aim was one of exhilarated clarity. The studios that churn out “This Means War” and its ilk, on the other hand, seem genuinely worried that an audience left to contemplate human deeds without the assistance of sonic or editorial frenzy might start to think for itself. People might look at Chris Pine’s eyes and wonder, first, why a blue so startling and unreal should suggest not the gleam of a born seducer but one of the stronger brands of industrial cleaning gel. And, second, whether the character he depicts here, for all its vigor, is anything more than a jerk.

That is certainly how Lauren reads him at the start. They meet at a video store, a setting that might have seemed fresh and topical sometime around the summer of 1993. He actually says, “I know movies. And women,” a boast that would be correct only if uttered by George Cukor. At a follow-up encounter, Lauren credits him with “the emotional intelligence of a fifteen-year-old boy.” So why do her powers of discrimination desert her? Maybe because she has the sartorial intelligence of a fifteen-year-old girl: tiny-skirted dresses in baby blue, or even smaller shorts with teetering wedge heels—the latter worn to a pet shelter, where she croons over the abandoned mutts. To compare her with the knowing, resourceful, and far from docile female figure in “Wings” (none other than Clara Bow) is a cause for shame. Such is the cultural evidence that is submitted by “This Means War”: irrefutable proof that, in certain areas of Hollywood, sexual politics are going backward, fast.

Reese Witherspoon is a woman, aged thirty-five, with a bundle of grownup roles behind her. Yet in order to retain her slot in romantic comedy, it appears, she must reverse into her teens. What makes the transition yet more depressing is the memory of Tracy Flick. Witherspoon was twenty-three when she played Tracy, in “Election,” and Tracy herself was only a high-school student, but her soul was bent on adult habits of command and control. She was nobody’s friend, but she was nobody’s fool. I long to know not just where she is now—along what corridors of finance or government she stalks—but also what she would make of a ditz like Lauren, who mopes at length over her own inability to choose a mate. And here’s the joke: although she does eventually choose between Tuck and F.D.R. (a decision I would be happy to reveal, if I could remember what it was), neither of them needs her. They are perfectly content as partners, buddies, and, who knows, given time, something more. “I love you, man,” one says, at the climax of events. “Love you, too,” the other replies. This doesn’t mean war at all. This means peace.

The opening moments of “Bullhead” are rich in foreboding and gloom, with a dark wood glimmering into view at the edge of a field, and yet, after the cacophony of “This Means War,” they come as a blessed relief. A low voice speaks: “Sometimes in a man’s life, stuff happens that makes everyone go quiet.” Over the next two hours, one particular man will loom into being, like the forest. His name is Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts), a cattle farmer in the Flemish-speaking region of Belgium, and you could easily mistake him for a member of his herd. He is several sizes larger, in every direction, than the surrounding humans, and he walks with a swinging, bovine slouch. The director of photography, Nicolas Karakatsanis, who mostly does a marvellous job, turns to slow-motion to emphasize that gait, but there is no need. Most troubling of all is Jacky’s face, with its lazy eye and its air of inward bruising, as if somebody, once upon a time, had treated him like meat.

The movie takes place in what is referred to as “the hormone Mafia underworld,” a district of criminal experience into which even Tony Soprano, no veal calf himself, might have hesitated to stray. We learn of it but not much about it, and I was soon floundering in the slurry of furtive transactions that passes for a plot—rendered even thicker by the doubleness of Belgian society, with its linguistic split. A couple of French-speaking car mechanics from Liège are, to the detriment of the movie’s mood, played for laughs; who would have guessed that the French would be the doltish butt of the Flemish? Yet such are the precision and the poise wielded elsewhere by the director, Michaël R. Roskam, that, in the end, he more than merits the benefit of the doubt, as well as the Oscar nomination that “Bullhead” has received for Best Foreign-Language Film. The murk, in other words, is deliberate. Whether the bottles and the vials lined up in Jacky’s fridge are meant for cattle, to increase growth, or whether they contain the testosterone that he injects into himself, for the same reason, is a confusion left unresolved. Jacky is not merely beefed up. He is a Minotaur in the making, and that, surely, is why his story becomes such a labyrinth.

Not that he suddenly sprouts horns, or a ring through his nose. There are almost no special effects in “Bullhead,” and only scattered outbreaks of violence. Jacky threatens more with a light slap than most of us could do with a battering ram. There aren’t even many cows to be seen. Roskam’s concern is brutish behavior, wherever he finds it among men; “You are all animals,” in the nervous words of Lucia (Jeanne Dandoy), who runs a perfume store. She knew Jacky, briefly, twenty years ago, and is one of the few people with some understanding of what he suffered then. The flashbacks to that period, with Robin Valvekens as the young Jacky—a beautiful boy, which only makes things worse—could not be more traumatic, and the constant, inescapable shove of the past leaves “Bullhead” feeling less like muscular melodrama and more like a sad saga of distress and loss. “Don’t break anything,” Lucia tells Jacky when he visits her, as if her home were a china shop. But the damage was done long ago. ♦